


Purpose

by HereThereBeFic



Category: Princess Bride (1987), Princess Bride - William Goldman
Genre: Friendship, Shipping, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-24
Updated: 2013-03-24
Packaged: 2017-12-06 09:29:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/734144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HereThereBeFic/pseuds/HereThereBeFic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He asked of Fezzik, “What am I now?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Purpose

**Author's Note:**

> Note: Written with the book in mind.
> 
> Trigger Warning: suicidal thoughts.

Once they reached the island, the main goal for a long while was Recovery. In terms of physical health, two of them were, on the whole, quite hale – the other two, quite not.

Buttercup tended to Westley. If anyone had asked Fezzik what he thought, which no one did, he probably, if pressed, would have admitted that in his own opinion and meaning no offense, she was being quite frankly a little possessive about the whole thing. But if there were two things Fezzik would never dream of doing, one was arguing with people who were smarter than him (those people being, in Fezzik’s opinion, and in a great many of those people’s opinions, very nearly everyone he happened across and most everyone he didn’t), and the other was pretending to understand the nature of true love.

At least, not the sort that Westley and Buttercup shared. Privately, to himself, he thought that there were probably plenty of kinds of true love that didn’t involve being in constant danger, and maybe even some other versions that did but still weren’t quite the same, but he didn’t suppose anyone really wanted to hear his thoughts about love. Or anything, really, but especially that. Especially now.

But the upshot of all of this was that Buttercup tended to Westley, and Fezzik put up no fight about this, which left him with Inigo.

Which was fine with Fezzik, and honestly he couldn’t even think of an argument that he wasn’t willing make because none crossed his mind to begin with.

This was not to say Inigo was always the most pleasant company. His mood and his health waxed and waned, often without any apparent connection to each other. There were days he was pale and still and hardly breathed, but if Fezzik asked after his thoughts, he was the happiest man in the world to be alive and healing and with his quest fulfilled. And then there were days he could sit and crawl and, later, even walk, and on some of those days he moved ceaselessly and muttered at Fezzik if he was there to listen and no one if he wasn’t, and condemned himself and the six-fingered man and once his own father – though on that occasion he repented even mid-sentence, and begged the empty sky for forgiveness, weeping that he was not well, had not meant it, would never undo what he had done, which only led him back into condemning Rugen all over again for giving him the thing to do in the first place.

That day he went suddenly very quiet and very still, and Fezzik gave up asking what the matter was and only waited for Inigo to decide to tell him in his own time.

And in his own time, Inigo did.

“He is dead, Fezzik,” he whispered, curled on his side and clutching loosely at grass. “By my hand. And still I hate him. Still this hold on me.”

“You are not well, Inigo,” Fezzik responded. “When you are better, maybe you will not think of him so much.”

“…or let me sleep in a hutch,” Inigo said weakly, and it wasn’t his best-connected rhyme, but certainly not his worst, considering the ninety days of brandy, and at any rate it brought an end to the gloomier conversations for that day.

Another day, when his mood more matched his health, when being awake and blinking and speaking was about all he felt like attempting in the way of movement, he asked of Fezzik, “What am I now?”

“You are Inigo Montoya,” Fezzik replied, sensing a trick.

There was one.

“And who is that? What is the point of him?” Inigo asked quietly, staring up at the sky. He continued before Fezzik could respond again. “Rugen did not attack from higher or lower ground. He did not lead me onto ice. We did not do battle in high water, or through thick trees, or leaping across rocks. All of these things, I learned, I _mastered – because_ of _him_ , to _prepare_ for _him_ , because _what if –_ and almost none of it mattered, in the end.” Inigo was still speaking quietly, so very quietly. The dangerous sort of quiet. “He was a coward, and he threw a dagger, and with all my preparation, I was not prepared for that. He was a _coward_ and he ran from me and all the training in the world did me less good than an act of cowardice would have, if I had only thrown my sword at his back. He was a coward, and he was _older_ , and slower, and I could have bested him with five, perhaps _six years less_ of _preparing._ ” He turned his head on the last word, spitting it into the grass. “He was no master swordsman,” he hissed. “He was a _coward_ , a coward who struck out at an exhausted man without warning and scarred a grieving child and _fled_ , and I spent the best of my life on him. And for my father’s sake, I cannot regret it. But for my own sake, I’m left to ask – Fezzik, _what am I now_?”

“You are Inigo Montoya,” Fezzik said again, more firmly this time. “A master swordsman.”

And Inigo sat up, and made a try at launching himself at Fezzik, perhaps to grip him dramatically by the shoulders, or at least as much of one shoulder as he could get ahold of, but he fell a bit short and landed on his stomach in the grass. “WHAT _FOR?”_ he howled. “RUGEN IS DEAD!”

“Because you… love… fencing?” Fezzik tried.

And Inigo laughed, and laughed, and kept laughing, and kept laughing and kept laughing and kept right on laughing until he was weeping, face down in the grass. And then at last he pushed himself up. “I love my _father_ ,” he said softly, eyes bright and piercing. “That much I have always been sure of. Fencing?” He tried to shrug, but he was still being mostly held up by his arms, so it was more an uncomfortable wrenching motion that traveled down the whole of his spine. “ _Fencing._ ” He didn’t quite spit the word. He couldn’t, he couldn’t _quite_ , bring himself to _that._ “Who knows? Maybe I really, truly, _honestly_ love it. Maybe I would still have loved it, without the six-fingered man. But those are maybes that are too late to find out. I love fencing, have loved it, because I love my father. The fencing was necessary, and I did not hate it, so I learned to love it because that was the only way to learn it as I have.”

“You could… do something _else_ ,” Fezzik said, less and less sure of himself the longer this conversation went on.

“Hmm.” Inigo laughed again, but it was a better laugh this time. Quieter, and not in a worrying sort of way. “Yes. Yes. I’ll just. Take up… what do people take up?”

Fezzik shrugged. “Things they like. Or think they might like?”

“There is no brandy here.”

“I do not think drinking counts as a hobby.”

Inigo rocked forward to lay flat on the ground, letting his forehead crash against his arms. “I don’t need a _hobby_ ,” he muttered, glaring at the grass. “Fencing wasn’t - isn’t - wasn’t… Has never been a _hobby_. For me.”

“Maybe it could be one now…?”

“No.” He shook his head. “It holds no pleasure for me now, unless the opponent is of the highest calibre. The man in black was the first honest challenge I faced for many years. …The first honest… _fun._ ”

“There you are. Fun. Sounds like a hobby to me.”

“Westley will have other things to attend to when he is well.”

“You could look for other people to fight.”

Inigo pushed himself up again, giving Fezzik such a purely _happy_ look that Fezzik thought one of them must be getting the conversation the wrong way around. Probably himself. And then again, in this state, maybe Inigo.

“Fezzik,” Inigo said, and his voice was faraway and threatening to dissolve into laughter again. Possibly the scary kind. “Fezzik, my dear, dear friend, _Fezzik_ \- if there is one thing I am totally and completely, absolutely, definitely and _definitively_ done with and never going to miss, it’s _looking_ for people.” And with a satisfied sort of sigh, he rolled over onto his back, staring at the sky again with an easily genuine resolve. “To fight, or otherwise.”

Fezzik smiled. “That’s a start.”

“…But I still don’t know what I am,” Inigo said, volume and mood falling as one. “What is the point of me, Fezzik?”

Fezzik wished he could dismiss this line of thinking as above and beyond him, but – well, it was. But he was still familiar with it. He just wasn’t any surer of its navigation than Inigo was.

“I should have died with him,” Inigo murmured, folding his hands over his heart and dropping one to hover over his still-healing wound. “With Rugen. It would have been more… artistic. …More beautiful. The _end_ of something.”

“I would not have thought it was beautiful.”

“You don’t understand art.”

“I haven’t got the heart.”

“The problem is your _brain_.”

“Still, it would — bring me pain.”

“You’d soon be right as rain.”

“I did — once think you slain.”

“That doesn’t sound a strain.”

“Please — don’t leave me lost again.”

At which point the game, and the conversation, came to a rest for some time.

“All right,” Inigo said eventually, voice a wretched whisper. “All right, all _right._ But what am I, then? If I am to stay alive, it must be for a clear purpose. Something I can _be_ , with every _bit_ of my courage and strength and _will_ , Fezzik. I do not know any other way to live.”

And he sounded so very, very miserable, so very close to hopeless, that Fezzik did something he did not often like to do: he taxed his brain to its fullest extent. He thought. And he thought, and he thought. He did not know where to turn his thoughts - he merely hoped that they would find the right way on their own.

He thought about his classmates, all those years ago. He thought about the circus, and the BOOing, and Greenland. He thought about whispering rhymes late at night so that Vizzini would not hear. He thought about shouting a name at the top of the Cliffs of Insanity. He thought about feeling just slightly safer all that way underground, surrounded by the dark and the deadly, because of who was down there with him.

He thought. And he thought. And he thought. And he said, “You are my friend. You are my first friend not to betray me, or abandon me, or give up on me. That is something you can be for a long time yet. …I’m sure it is no good, because I thought of it. But maybe it will do for now. Until you think of something better.”

And Inigo sat up, and looked at Fezzik. And he thought. And he thought. And he thought.

And he said, “That will do for a good long while, my friend.”

And Fezzik smiled, slow and wide. “Until the end?”

And Inigo smiled back, quick and blade-thin. “And death transcend.”

Which was a bit much, perhaps - but it rhymed, and that was theirs. And that suddenly mattered just a little bit more than it already had.


End file.
